The Zionist factions that were foundational to the establishment of the Israeli state saw the Holocaust as proof of two things: first, that the Jewish people would never truly be safe in the world without a country of their own, and second, that the horrors visited on Jews by the Nazis, and European antisemites before them, and the Cossacks before them, demonstrated that no extreme was unjustified in the establishment and protection of that state. Those attitudes have been at the bedrock of modern day Israel from its founding. To those who adhere to them, “Never again” is short for “Never again to us,” and damn anybody who doesn’t fit their narrow (conservative, religiously observant, largely white Ashkenazi) vision of Jewishness.

To these folks, ethnic cleansing of Palestine was always the goal, and they’ve been waiting decades for an international order that would look the other way while they purged, displaced, and slaughtered their way to complete Israeli control of the land they saw as theirs to take. Now they’ve got it, and they’re not wasting any time.

Given how buddy-buddy he is with Erdogan and Modi, I don’t think that’s strictly true – but no, with a name like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow (really!), perhaps there are some prejudices at play…

Last I checked, Turkmenistan’s entire economy had been turned towards the project of sucking off their former president (who is the dad of the current president) by building lots of garish statues, museums, hotels with his name and face on them. One would think that sort of thing would be right up Donny’s alley.

737s don’t have RATs. According to some 737 pilots I’ve seen commenting, the APU is operable in flight, but doesn’t kick in automatically and would have required ~60 seconds to start. The main electrical generators don’t automatically restart after tripping, either, so a scenario where electric power is hypothetically available, but a panicked or overloaded flight crew don’t take the steps to bring it online, is plausible.

Hydraulics and electric system are independent in commercial aircraft – hydraulic pumps are directly driven from the engines, as are electrical generators. Redundancy is provided via independent loops/buses from each engine. A bird strike on its own is unlikely to be energetic enough to sever one of those independent systems, let alone all four. Losing both engines could do it, – but again, they had enough thrust to attempt a go-around, so they weren’t a glider immediately after the bird strike. The 737 is an old-school design, too, so most critical components have full manual reversion – as long as you have airspeed and altitude enough to get to the runway, you can fly and land the plane just with cable controls and manual releases in the event of total electric and hydraulic failure.

I did a bit of reading from other sources and this particular aircraft predates the requirement for battery backup of the FDR and CVR, and the APU does not start up automatically on a power failure, so the failure chain for that part of the incident isn’t as long as I initially thought. Still, lots of questions, and I think the simplest explanation so far is the aircrew panicking and making a survivable situation into a bloodbath.

Everything about this incident is just so fucking odd. That a bird strike could take out both engines isn’t unheard of (see US Airways Flight 1549) but I’ve heard reports that there was a failed emergency landing attempt before the one that we saw video of, so they clearly had thrust enough to stay in the air for a go-around, and from the video we saw they carried in a ton more speed than I would expect if there had been catastrophic damage to both engines.

Except that the lack of landing gear suggests loss of hydraulic power from both engines… Except there is an emergency release that drops the gear on a 737 with just gravity, and there’s no evidence this was even attempted.

Now it looks like some electrical systems, including power to the data recorders, died right at the start of the incident, which would require not just double engine failure but failure of the APU and backup battery systems. That just seems incredibly unlikely.

Catastrophic electrical failure several minutes before the crash, though, would suggest that it wasn’t just a case of a panicked aircrew making a chain of bad decisions, which was my initial read of the situation and maybe the best fit for the rest of the circumstances.

I just can’t think of a chain of events that could reasonably lead to all the failures in evidence while still allowing the aircraft to remain airworthy for two landing attempts.

And then you get to the horrifying fact that a relatively new and modern airport had a giant concrete obstacle in what would be considered the Runway Safety Area at a US facility… Like, what the fuck? That seems like it’s designed to create this sort of a disaster.

Sorry. Not casting aspersions on you, just despairing at the situation.

The math leans towards the former, but when the two hypotheses suggested by the data are “we are actively and selectively targeting noncombatants” and “we just don’t give half a shit who we’re killing,” in a sane world you’d be universally branded as “the baddies” in the conflict.

On most carriers this is code for “coach, but it’s an exit row so we’ll charge extra for the legroom.”

TLDR: the polio vaccine used to contain weakened versions of the three strains of poliovirus. When weakened live virus vaccines are used, the people inoculated with them shed copies of those viruses, which is usually no big deal… except that one of those weakened polio strains would, very rarely, mutate back into its full-strength form and sicken unvaccinated people living around those who were being vaccinated.

Eight years ago, the decision was made to remove the problematic strain of polio from the vaccine, because it was thought low wild infection rates meant that the risk of vaccination-derived infection had become higher than catching it from the environment. Regrettably, it seems that decision was made in error – type 2 polio outbreaks have soared since then.

Somewhere a philosophy undergrad just sat bolt upright and shouted, “A TROLLEY PROBLEM! I must go, the world needs me!”

Alas, I was so looking forward to hearing them parrot the talking points of acclaimed Leninist… (checks notes) … JD Vance.

With regard to this specific issue, you don’t even have to go looking for cases of young women being discouraged from reporting rape and sexual assault allegations against promising young athletes, because “think how you could hurt his future prospects” – examples are so plentiful that you can’t help but find them if you spend any time reviewing sports news. It’s really only been in the last decade or so that anybody has seriously pushed back against the idea that Johnny Sportsball’s ability to score points for the local team is more important than the safety and bodily autonomy of women.

I mean, if nothing else they got Republicans to embrace gun control.

If it ain’t leaking that means it’s empty, etc…

My grandfather was a Marine and later a Secret Service agent. He didn’t tell many stories, but one of the few he did was about riding a helicopter down to the ground through autorotation during engine-out testing – this was apparently while they were qualifying the original Marine One for Eisenhower’s use.

Helicopters are sometimes rightly derided as “a collection of spare parts flying in loose formation” but in this case it seems like they were spitting in the face of God and daring him to do something about it – flying into dangerous terrain, in inclement weather, in what very likely was an old and ill-maintained aircraft. That’s a lot of bad choices to make at once.

This is the thing. Netanyahu is a sociopath who needs a forever war or else he eventually has to face the music. Without outside military intervention, this only ends in one of two ways:

1. either Bibi drags it out long enough to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza, claim he defeated Hamas, and memory-hole the intelligence failures that allowed the October 7 attacks to succeed in the first place, or

2. he loses control of his political coalition, elections are called, and he’s quickly removed from his PM position, put on trial for corruption and then thrown in prison for what will probably be the rest of his life.

Prolonging the war doesn’t guarantee he won’t end up in scenario 2 anyway, but from his perspective at the very least he’s running out the clock. Dead Gazans (and to a lesser extent dead Israelis) don’t matter to him.

I can’t wait for Cold War 2: Thermonuclear Boogaloo.

I mean, at this point an “ideal” solution (such as it is) would be for the US to stop stonewalling UN Security Council resolutions so that the other members can greenlight a peacekeeping operation a la Kosovo, that would stop the fighting, open up aid flows, and create an avenue for effective enforcement of the 1948 treaty boundaries on the way towards implementing a functional two-state solution. But that seems pretty unlikely right now.

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